This is anecdotal, but every time I say I have a bad feeling about something
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Youโre mad because youโre so deeply invested and wired into something that me yelling that the emperor is naked makes you want to fight.
@hacks4pancakes (...but what about all that Emperor stock I just bought, are you saying it's worthless now?? Clearly this is all your fault, for setting off the big sell-off before I had a chance to cash in on the bubble. ๐คก)
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@lesley @hacks4pancakes Have him watch "Colossus: The Forbin Project."
As an aside on the movie, one of the funniest parts for us technically saavy users, the program was apparently in BASIC, he typed RUN to start it.
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The one I havenโt won out on because thankfully the other shoe hasnโt dropped is insecure child tracking apps but omg
@hacks4pancakes The other shoe was actually under the bed the whole time, no need to wait. >.<
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This is anecdotal, but every time I say I have a bad feeling about something
(See: Elon and companies, alleged grassy knoll ear shots, LLMs, cryptocurrency, Gamergate, project 2025)
And I get tech people yelling at me in the comments,
Within two years Iโm proven extremely right.
@hacks4pancakes sorry in advance for the joke, but in most of the cases you mention, you were extremely right and they were extremely to the right. Far right.
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@RegGuy @hacks4pancakes Last night, my uncle (investor/manager, zero computing background) called me saying he wants to install OpenClaw on his machine (and "to automate my company") with a lot of FOMO energy. He asked me because he didn't have the skill to figure out how to install that (and yet still thinks it is fine to let it "automate" his company, unmaintained?) I honestly don't know how to dissuade him.
@lesley @RegGuy @hacks4pancakes Tell him what it is - a scam. If it is too good to be true it probably is right? Remind him that there is no such thing as a free lunch. You don't need ELI5 here - the problem is social not technical.
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@mrrmot @cford @hacks4pancakes
Once we agree on the basic observable facts, I find that predictions about the future can be quite subjective. And rational decision making must involve expectations about likely future consequences, I would think.
"Agree on the basic observable facts" is not a thing in at least one country with an enormous lot of highly concentrated power and wealth.
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undefined oblomov@sociale.network shared this topic on
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This is anecdotal, but every time I say I have a bad feeling about something
(See: Elon and companies, alleged grassy knoll ear shots, LLMs, cryptocurrency, Gamergate, project 2025)
And I get tech people yelling at me in the comments,
Within two years Iโm proven extremely right.
I kinda hate that you're right so often, but glad you're smart enough to see the things I can't.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@levelbot I feel good about myself and this number.
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@reiver@mastodon.social knowing people in general... They will get more bug reports if they said "whom"
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@reiver I've heard John Mastodon personally picks those out of a tall hat, for each user, individually. What a great man.
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I'm writing this in English.
Not because English is my first languageโit isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.
This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.
@Gargron@mastodon.social argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.
For many of us, translation is first about access.
The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translatedโand into which languagesโfollows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.
@Gargron@mastodon.social notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. KoreanโEnglish, JapaneseโEnglish, ChineseโEnglish? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating โmachine translationโ as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.
There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: โI would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.โ For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.
I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron@mastodon.social describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.
The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misreadโthat's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.
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I've been checking out @inkwell , the new journaling app on the Fediverse. It looks absolutely great. Fantastic work by @stanton. If you'd like to follow me there, check out @evan@inkwell.social.
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There is the complete list that Mastodon is suggesting I (potentially) follow.
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Moaner's CRYING TOWELS
only 15ยข from Johnson Smith and Co (1951)
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It's "Whom To Follow" not "Who To Follow".
I.e., WHOM not WHO.
...
Also, I wonder how Mastodon picked those choices to me to (potentially) follow.
